I'm a drummer who owns a guitar which I do not play well. This blog is a chronical of my guitar playing experience with Rocksmith.
I mostly play a Michael Kelly Valor II with coil-split humbuckers and a Fender MIM Telecaster (and a few others). I play on XBox 360/Live using a wireless transmitter. My kids play, too (Fender Squier Strat and Washburn/Lyon LG115) and I'll cover some of their Rocksmith experiences if they can ever stay un-grounded long enough to use the XBox.

Monday, January 13, 2014

Old and New Rocksmith Songs and Using Score Attack to Learn Them All

Monday, 13 January 2014

Been playing the Telecaster again this weekend. The Michael
Kelly Valor seems very noisy lately. Might have been noisy all along but I’ve just
started noticing it. Not sure if the pick-ups are bad or the body cavities
would benefit from shielding or what, but I may have to trade that guitar in.
It’s like I can’t even touch it without it making noise. Not feedback. Just
string noise. It’s like the pick-ups are picking up the slightest vibration.
Maybe that’s supposed to be a good thing, but I find it sort of annoying and
distracting. I can’t imagine trying to record with that guitar doing that.
Thanks to therapy for my dislocated elbow, I have a chunks of paraffin that I can
melt down and pot the pick-ups with, so I might try that solution.

Despite the fact that I’ve got a whole bunch of new RS14
songs to play with, I’ve been mostly playing with songs from Old RockSmith (ORS
- including DLC songs that I bought back then). Specifically, I’ve been playing
Smooth (Santana) and the old DLC Christmas songs (God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,
Carol of the Bells, and We 3 Kings) quite a lot lately. Yes, I know Christmas
is over but once again I failed to meet my goal of performing these songs live
anywhere. So, I’ll continue working on them until next Christmas – which is
just 346 days away.

I’ve also been playing Score Attack a LOT. Still not quite
the same as the old RS events, but I’ve got to say that in terms of motivation
Score Attack keeps me playing longer than events ever did. I’m one of those
people that will “just one more time” myself to death just to get into the top xx
on the Leaderboard.

I’m still super pissed off that my stupid wireless router
kept me from posting a #3 leaderboard score for Smooth. But, I’ve made up for that. Last night I was digging around
for something different to play (i.e. not the Christmas DLC from 2011) and I
decided to pull up Surf Hell since I
haven’t played that in ages. Ran through it a couple of times in LAS mode and
by golly it actually did come back to me fairly quickly. Of course, it should
be burned into my brain and fingers forever – that was one of the first songs I
really hammered on, and Mastered/memorized, in ORS. Interestingly, in RS14 the
lead arrangement for Surf Hell is slightly different than the “combo”
arrangement I learned in ORS. Instead of the double-stops under the chorus
there are just 1/8 notes played on the E string (3d fret). And, the chords are
gone. So, a bit easier actually than what I had learned before. Still, I
started with Easy mode in Score Attack and prepared to work my way up from
there. My third attempt was a platinum (100% accuracy) run. My fourth attempt
got me to #1 on the Leaderboard. It’s the little victories that keep us going,
right?

That one inspired me quite a bit. Even though it was after
12:30, I decided to have a go at God Rest
Ye Merry Gentlemen on Score Attack, Master level. Eh. Not at the top of the
heap, but not too far down the list. I pulled off a 762,822 with 99.17%
accuracy. From memory. Good for 56th out of 197 players. I finally
knocked off around 1:20 AM.

Score Attack has become part of my regular song-learnin’
process now. Occasionally RS14’s learning tasks will include playing Score Attack,
but even when it doesn’t come up in the recommended learning activities, I’ll
generally play through something in LAS mode a few times to get familiar with
it, maybe hit Riff Repeater to pull a difficult phrase up to par, and then play
the song in Score Attack just to see where I stack up. Helps keep things
interesting.

That’s how I started with You Really Got Me. I played it six times in LAS. At that point, I
seemed to hit a wall in LAS, so I switched to Score Attack and played the Easy
level about 5-6 times. I also recently tried Castle Chordead for the first time.
Kind of fun, but I don’t have a lot of trouble with chords so I’m not sure how
often I’ll be playing this one. It’s a good game, though. I mean, kind of goofy
in a fun, retro way, but basically an entertaining way to work on chord
transitions since you have to identify, form, and play each chord pretty damn
fast to stay alive.

The other night I unlocked the Level 5 Venue. I still can’t
tell any difference when I’m playing. The gazillion skins I’ve unlocked aren’t
exactly doing much for me, either. Sort of like the eye-candy guitars in ORS.
I’m unlikely to go into Tone Designer to change the skins on my speaker cabinet
from black to red. I’m sure some of you all love it, and that’s cool. Just not
my thing. In fact, I’m still not into the whole Tone Designer thing very much.
However, I do plan to set up a very clean tone that I’ll have as a default
setting between songs so that if I’m noodling around or accidentally hit the
strings between songs I’m not always hearing the really loud, high-gain tone
that seems to be my current default.

Kind of odd thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve got a whole new
batch of songs to play now and I just haven’t gotten too excited about many of
the new RS14 songs. There was Walk This
Way, but we all know how that went. . . I haven’t even tried playing that song
in weeks. Since then, I’ve hardly played anything from RS14. There are some
songs that I had been looking forward to playing, but it turned out that many of
them require bizarre non-standard tunings which I’m just not real interested in
messing with. Laziness, I know. Really doesn’t take that much to retune down
half a step to E-flat, but it’s a pain unless you plan to play a whole set of
songs tuned to E-flat. While Round and Round is an awesome, old-school hair
metal song that I’ve always liked - and is on my Mission list right now - I
just won’t play it. I mean, yeah, eventually I will pick one guitar (probably
either my old Frankenstrat or my new but barely touched Epi LP Special) to
re-tune to E-flat and leave it there specifically to play that one song. But,
I’m just not going to choose a song in the middle of a playing session or
multi-player session that I’ve got to retune all six strings to play. Drop-D is
one thing. E-flat is just more than I’m willing to deal with as a rule. Which
leaves out at least a few of the songs I really like from RS14’s song list.

5 comments:

What annoys me the most with the new Rocksmith is the alternate A tunings... This is even worst than E-flat as often you tune for that specific song...It wouldn't have been so hard to pitch-shift the songs a bit in order to tune it with A#440. I think this is a really stupid design decision.I know I know, there is the "artist vision" and the "integrity" of the song... But I don't really care of that.

And I agree, skins are useless. The only one thing I changed are the fret inlays, as there is one I unlocked and like a lot : numbers :). It makes it even more easy to know where you are on the neck.

An even worse thing about alternate tunings is when you're trying to jam along with something on the radio or from an MP3 or CD! By the time I've figured out that the song is in some bizarr-o tuning, it's too late!

kg: Do those things mechanically re-tune themselves or do they just "process" the notes digitally between the pick-ups and the output jack? I can usually hear my strings, so I'd think it might be very difficult to hear that pitch and an alternate, modified pitch coming from my amp!

In fact, I often have this issue in RS. Sometimes the pitch of my actual strings doesn't match the pitch that RS has interpreted or played back and it's painful to hear! I end up stopping and going to the Tuner to try to get things lined up again.